This is a fascinating thread.
I'm just going to throw in a few thoughts that have been going around my
head.
We are probably rather spoiled living in an age of recordings.
I'm thinking of the interpretation of the dots as opposed to actual
playing of them "as written".
I suppose this is one reason we have a conductor for an orchestra and
why different conductors have very different interpretations of any one
piece of music.
This, of course, is also true of the spoken word (hence the director
with the cry of "more passion").
Having something written down can only give, at best, basic instructions
(how loud is loud?) as we can see with some local drama groups. The
words are pronounced correctly but the performance varies depending on
the actor.
Whilst the dots and instructions of written music can tell us a lot,
what they should actually have sounded like is something we have lost
over the years (and music is just as susceptible to Chinese whispers as
speech). As I said at the start of this thread, I Beethoven were alive
today and could hear (:)), would he have recognised his compositions as
played and, for that matter, would Jamie Allan have recognised the pipe
tunes he played listening to them now.
Playing the dots is one thing, interpreting them another which is why I
believe that both methods (written and aural tradition) are still
important although who decides which sound is "right" is something only
the composer can do (unless you hear the composer playing and he/she
says "this is the way it's supposed to be played" which may, in some
cases, be preferable to writing the dots - depending on the "dot writing
ability" of the composer. Recordings help with that, of course.
As an aside from that, I'd love to have heard the two compositions I
once entered for the competitions ("too similar to existing tune" and
"needs more work - to jerky") being played by a "real" piper to see if
the dots I wrote down bore any similarity to what I intended (had to use
a music notation program to play them back in midi). One of them I have
never been able to play on the pipes themselves as it's faster than my
fingers).
Great topic of conversation. Keep 'em coming.
Colin Hill
On 22/06/2011 11:21, [email protected] wrote:
Generally people in literate societies have far worse memories
than in societies with oral/aural cultures.
Ask an ear player how many tunes he knows - it will be more
than I can remember where I kept the dots of....
Swings and roundabouts.
C
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